Let’s talk about sales funnels and the ways that building a sales funnel that will help you drive growth and new business in your organization.
If you build your sales funnels the right way, you’ll have a better time holding the attention of your prospects. This alone will help progress your prospect through the buying decision. On-going content development provides your prospects with a consistent reminder about you and your business. Consistency is one of the influence factors that Robert Cialdini developed in his famous book about persuasion and influence. His point is that consumers also behave consistency. By getting small agreements from your prospects (such as the agreement to read your blog, the agreement to click for a sample and so on, you are developing a behavioral pattern among your prospects that will ultimately deliver ‘big yes’ when it becomes time to say ‘yes’ to the purchase decision!
Another important factor in Cialdini’s influence and persuasion model is ‘scarcity’. You’re already familiar with scarcity. Every time you see an ad that features a ‘Must act now! Inventory is selling out fast!” message, you are encountering the scarcity factor. It’s effective because it motivates people through a fear of personal loss. It might sound crazy, but psychologically people are more influenced by missing out on the advantages or benefits that your products represent than by the satisfaction they’ll actually enjoy once they purchase the product. Weird, right? The idea is “Hey! Here’s a tremendous deal that might not come again! Act now, don’t miss out!”
Atomization is an important principle found in successful campaigns. It’s based on the fact that most people need to hear a message many times before we actually pay attention to it. Of course, repeating the exact same message many times is also a guarantee that you’ll bore your prospects into a deep sleep, so it’s important to find different ways to deliver your core messages. People also learn in many different ways. Atomization includes retelling your critical stories through a variety of different content forms. Some people prefer to learn by reading so they might be the perfect individual to direct a blog to. Other folks might prefer a podcast. There are still more prospects that like meaty little nuggets of information and statistics; infographics are a great way to approach them. By re-telling that story with different methods, you are reaching a broader audience and, since many people access multiple content types, frequency is also built into the campaign. Atomization is also a solution to avoiding burn-out (prospects have heard a message too often and are now ignoring the message). On average it takes about five exposures to an ad message before it has any impact. It’s also true though that once a message has been heard too often, it loses its ability to hold people’s attention. The important numbers are ‘5’ repetitions to start making an impact and ‘11’ repetitions before its impact has been totally used up.